The Image of Opium and Morphine in Hispanic Modernista Literature, 1876-1949

THE IMAGE OF OPIUM AND MORPHINE IN HISPANIC MODERNISTA LITERATURE, 1876-1949 Philip Clark Hollingsworth A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romances Languages (Spanish). Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Juan Carlos González Espitia Oswaldo Estrada Irene Gómez-Castellano Nancy LaGreca Jessica Tanner © 2015 Philip Clark Hollingsworth ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Philip Clark Hollingsworth: The Image of Opium and Morphine in Hispanic Modernista Literature, 1876-1949. (Under the direction of Juan Carlos González Espitia) The Image of Opium and Morphine in Hispanic Modernista Literature, 1876-1949 explores the images of opium and morphine in Hispanic prose and poetry of the turn of the twentieth century. This study examines the use of opiates in Hispanic literature in relation to society, the artist and the artistic process in four different manifestations: opium as parallel to the literary process, opiates’ role in the modernista aesthetic agenda, the role of morphine in anti- dandy/anti-European literature and opium smoke as a symbol of national illness and degeneration in sinophobic literature. The dissertation concludes that the use of opiates in Hispanic prose and poetry is fundamental to the relationship of the artist to their country’s role in the modernization process. The corpus of the dissertation includes the works of canonical authors such as José Asunción Silva, Rubén Darío, and Emilia Pardo Bazán but also incorporates writers on the margins of canonical study such as José María Vargas Vila, Santiago Rusiñol and Francisco Villaespesa. By viewing these works through the lens of opiate consumption, this dissertation will open a new field in Hispanic literary studies and will provide a new perspective on the Modernisms of Spain and Spanish America in relation to nation building, national identity and discourses of illness. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………….…………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1: READING, WRITING, AND THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISE: THE MODERNISTA LITERARY EXPERIENCE…………………………………………………….19 CHAPTER 2: LA DULZURA DEL LETEO: OPIUM, MORPHINE AND THE PATH TOWARDS MODERNITY…………………………………………………………………..….58 CHAPTER 3: OPIATES IN THE HISPANIC ANTI-DANDY NARRATIVE…………………97 CHAPTER 4: “DE ÁMBAR Y DE HUMO:” OPIUM AND CHINESE IMMIGRATION IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY SPANISH AND SPANISH AMERICAN LITERATURE.........144 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………179 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..186 iv INTRODUCTION On July 26th, 1919 the Mexico City daily newspaper El Demócrata reported the discovery by police of an opium den run by Carlos Ching, a Mexican citizen of Chinese descent. Agents were forced to break into the domicile discovering, “figuras humanas, en medio de una pesada atmósfera de humo, no daban señales de vida […] recostados sobre camastros y cojines, se encontraban tres orientales, […] parecían muertos, y sólo se notaba que tenían vida por extrañas sonrisas y funambulescos gestos que contraían sus rostros, debido, quizás, a las visiones que entreveían bajo el influjo del opio” (8). Connected to this opium den was a storage facility stocked with processed balls of opium, ready for consumption with a pipe. In the weeks that followed, investigators uncovered a vast drug ring involving several foot soldiers, border- crossing smugglers, former chemistry professor Donaciano Morales, the ex-undersecretary of Mexico’s Internal Revenue Service (el Departamento de Hacienda) and gubernatorial candidate of the Estado de San Luís Potosí Don Rafael Nieto; all led by a Jewish, German immigrant named Walter E. Herrmann. Herrmann’s enterprise included several storage houses, customized automobiles and business connections in New York and San Francisco.1 In total, over 15,000 canisters of opium were seized while it was estimated that Herrmann’s operation had already shipped between 30,000 and 40,000 canisters throughout Mexico and the US during the years of 1 One such storage facility was found behind a functioning cinema in which the opium was received and shipped in film canisters (“Descubre” 1). 1 the Mexican revolution (“Por obra” 1). 2 According to El Demócrata, Mexican officials had uncovered a multi-million peso clandestine operation. Despite the obvious, sensational nature of the discovery of such a large criminal enterprise in Mexico City, the coverage of this event by El Demócrata reveals much more about the 20th century’s increasingly negative stance on the “nefasta droga” opium. Essential to this historical event is opium’s connection to the national illness discourse and the perceived threat of foreign influences on Mexican society. The journalists chose to focus on the perceived dangers of the opium-smoking Chinese people within their borders as well as the danger of a European immigrant, former banker, and Jew such as Walter E. Herrmann that masterminded the whole endeavor. Opium was seen as a drug that “ha retardado en dos siglos la civilización del pueblo chino” and now the Chinese population had infected Mexican society with this “brutalizing” alkaloid.3 Herrmann became another example of the European exploiting the nation and draining its vital energy. Neither the poor, opium-smoking Chinese nor the wealthy, enterprising German depicted in El Demócrata conformed to the mestizo national identity of Mexico, a national/racial construct barely one-hundred years in development. Opium did not function within the positivist ideal of progress and nation either. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was believed that substance abuse led to a genealogical poisoning, an illness that would continue through innumerable generations, not only infecting individuals but entire societies (Stepan 84). Under this belief, if opium use had already degenerated Chinese society, there was a fear of similar 2 Each canister weighed approximately eighty pounds and was valued at around 80 pesos (“Por obra” 1). This means that the operation could have moved more than two tons of opium. 3 In the corpus of Hispanic opiate literature the verb embrutecer is often employed, suggesting the degenerative, de-humanizing effects of opium. More often than not, this verb is used to refer to the act opium smoking, the method of consumption most commonly associated with China and other countries of East Asia. 2 degeneration within the newly formed nations of Spanish America as well as Spain who, upon losing the last remaining vestiges of its former empire, was in a process of rediscovering its national identity. This perspective of opium is essential to the understanding of the regions’ culture and its representations in written form. The fear of the degenerative effects of opiate consumption in the Spanish-speaking world at the turn of the century may help to explain the scarcity of opiate references in the literary canon, as well as the lack of criticism regarding the use of opium as an image in Spanish and Spanish American literature. The image of opium and the opiate experience has been explored by many canonical authors of the period including José Asunción Silva, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Pío Baroja, Rubén Darío, Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Horacio Quiroga, and Santiago Rusiñol. This dissertation aims at opening this field of study to Hispanic texts of the late 19th century and early 20th century, previously relegated to the study of opiated literatures of England, France, and the United States. It will provide an assessment that debunks the assumption that the opium image was a simple imitation of European models and will demonstrate that the use of opiates and its derivatives were an integral part of Spanish and Spanish American modernista literature. This study will also explore the use of opium in the social and historical context of turn-of-the-century concepts of modernity, nation building, national identity, and national illness through foreign social “contaminants.” The dissertation will also reveal the diversity of the Spanish and Spanish American appropriation of the opium image as well as the importance of this image within the regions’ social/historical context and its literary tradition. In her book “The Hour of Eugenics,” Nancy Leys Stepan argues that the historical study of eugenics at the turn of the 20th century had primarily been focused on Northern Europe and the United States, ignoring the major impact on society, science and politics of eugenics in 3 “third-world” regions such as Latin America. In the introduction, Stepan makes the following critique regarding the historical study, or lack thereof, of Latin American eugenics: What historians often fail to appreciate is the contribution a region such as Latin America can make to our knowledge of how ideas become part of the complex fabric of social and political life; historians give too little weight to the construction of intellectual and scientific traditions within the region or to the way these traditions shape the meaning given to ideas, as subjects of interest in their own right (3). Likewise, the literary study of opiates in Spanish and Spanish American literature has been largely ignored or dismissed as an inferior copy of former European models. This dissertation aims to fill the void of scholarly research of opiate literature in Spain and Spanish America. It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly facilitated the emergence of opiates as a literary device in Spanish-speaking countries, but it is clear that the connotations of the drug and its use never really left the Western consciousness through literature or popular culture. Opium’s first major work, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, was published in 1821. However, canonical Spanish American writers did not deal with the drug in their literature until the mid-1870s and the drug really was not explored literarily until the writers began to employ the image in the 1880s. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire would publish some of the most influential works on drug consumption, including his translation/commentary on De Quincey’s seminal Confessions.

Load more